Lip service

This is similar to the point I was trying to say in my post. One can only assume that the paragraph:

…the tendency to pay lip service to these ends while devoting most of one’s energy to criticism of political opponents at home

was accidentally left in from the (long) pub session, ‘what valid criticisms can people make of us?’. It’s not just the lip service you correctly point out, but the rather unpleasant impression they give that all of these short-lived campaigns are merely another way to attack former colleagues of theirs in various left-wing groups. Obviously here the classic example is the disgraceful Unite Against Terror statements of many of them, which neither United or were Against Terror (Peter Tatchell has apologised but presumably Cohen stands by his rant), but also quite a few of the ‘why we signed’ of this week’s campaign.

Most of Euston is very agreeable, but there are problems. Some of it is a bit barmy in my opinion. For example, one is expected to “reject fear of modernity”. I wish I could, but it’s hard to be nonchalant regarding the prospect of catastrophic global warming. The record of modernity has been a rather mixed bag, scientific racism and social engineering as well as televisions and ‘green revolution’. I think the phrase underpins a certain cheerfully teleological streak shared both by neo-cons and (ex)- marxists.

The problem, I reckon, is the very vague formulation of the concept of agency. Classic manifestos identify a historic force (class, nation, the free-born or whatever) and pledge allegiance to it. For ‘Euston’, the agency seems to be ‘actually existing’ pluralist democracies as projectors of state power and example. But there is no examination of why governments should be privileged over, say, national communities, market-orientated civil societies or class alliance configurations as carriers of the democratic ethos.

The whole thing is rather intellectually and emotionally impoverished, leaving it with a negatively peevish tone particularly evident in the gratuitous dig at Amnesty International, as if they represent a signal threat to all we hold dear. There’s no sense of systematic strategic orientation, rather it’s a concatenation of tactical disputes and (often deserved) anathemas which will have little purchase beyond a few years or even months.

It remains the case that straight-forward neo-cons do this kind of thing a lot more effectively. They propose a clear-sighted road-map in furtherance of their ideals. There’s nothing like that in Euston.

One thing that struck me was the claim that some signatories opposed the Iraq war at the time. I couldn’t see any obvious examples – can anyone point some out.

.

Good luck in the search for a better argument, I’m sure, with half the blogosphere seemingly looking, one will be found soon.

‘It certainly seems to be uniting rather a lot of people in a frantic search to find some not completely spurious grounds to disagree with what is, after all, a rather uncontroversial set of statements.’

Yes but it’s like the old saw, the EM is both original and good, but the bits that are good are not original and the bits that are original are not good.

No I think it would have been better if it had begun: ‘We are writing this manifesto to show that you can perform contrary actions at the same time, in one single, fresh breath; we are against action; as for continual contradiction, and affirmation too, we are neither for nor against them, and we won’t explain ourselves because we hate common sense.’

Altogether now: ‘The amusement of redbellies in the mills of empty skulls! ‘

I would sign it.

http://www.391.org/manifestos/tristantzara_dadamanifesto.htm

“Mostly, as here, this consists of talking about things that could have been added but weren’t, which does seem a pretty bizarre set of grounds to criticise something intended as a lowest common denominator of common agreement.”

It isn’t bizarre when common-denominators are alluded to in the manifesto which call for serious working-out: a manifesto should have a certain scope and shape determined by its inner logic.

For example, pluralistic states (the USA par excellence) are identified as the democratic-revolutionary agent. This suggests an extension of the discussion to encompass real world problems. For example, why should we expect pluralist states to foster the spread of democratic government? How can we audit their contribution to this universal ideal? What mechanisms ensure the coincidence of state real politick and liberal internationalism?

The neo-cons have answers to these questions, whether one finds them agreeable or not. Euston offers no comparable left-progressive perspective; indeed no perspective at all.

Instead, demands are placed on the subscriber to excommunicate various shades of leftism. This is salutary in itself, no doubt, but it is of not a rigorous foundation for “fresh political alignment”. Prioritising small-change is the classic operating procedure of the sect.

Here’s a modest proposal for a specifically left interventionist program which actually puts demands on the relevant agents:

The manifesto’s ‘new internationalism’ proposes a “duty upon the international community of intervention and rescue”. To this might be added the rider that the intervening states undertake to bear the entire cost of ‘mission failure’. Most particularly, intervening states guarantee to receive and properly domicile all resulting refugees, relieving non-participating states of any responsibility to do so.

This attaches a sufficient price tag to the new internationalism; only realistic costing will allow for properly cautious and appropriate risk-taking. Otherwise, ‘new internationalism’ is likely to be only a cover for the self-interested manoeuvres of the great powers.

The Manifesto must aspire to some seriousness if it wishes to be taken seriously.

the core of your position is and always was resistance…

Time for a revival of resistentialism!

Les choses sont contre nous!

“The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”.

One should be more precise and explicitly recognise:
1. The right of the arabs living in Israel not to be expelled, or put under threat of expulsion, from Israel.
2. The right of the Palestinians living outside of Israel not to be colonised or ethnically cleansed.

If you dont get more precise, you can give ammunition to the ambitions of many in Israel to ‘The right of the Palestinian people to self-determination’ by expelling the Israeli arabs from Israeli, keeping colonies in the West Bank, and calling the result a Palestinian state.

Still, I suppose it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the methods employed by the FLN, the Mau Mau

Could you clarify why you included the Mau Mau in this list? Of all the insurgencies to mention as containing possibly dodgy tactics by the insurgents, I’m not sure what put this one over the top.

Fair enough Chris. I tend to notice Mau Mau usages given the frequent winger complaint about being “Mau Mau’d” in some respect, which is really laughable given the brutality of that war.

“it wouldn’t do to look too closely at the methods employed by the FLN, the Mau Mau, the NLF etc. just in case they resembled the “ugly forces” of the Iraqi insurgency”

True enough, but on the other hand their opposition to the Iraqi insurgency is presumably not based on its methods alone – there are other respects in which it differs from the FLN etc., no?

Still, imperialism is rather underplayed in the EM, not surprisingly since it seems to see itself as an imperialism-over-fascism charter.

Richard: “Marc Cooper is anti-war (including before the war), but he’s the only anti war person I’ve spotted on the list.”

Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen of Dissent Magazine are also “antiwar” in the sense that Cooper is. Which really means adopting a pro forma position while spending most of your time and energy castigating those who actually go out and organize demonstrations.

With the exception of Paul Berman, there are far fewer pro-war “leftists” in the USA than in Great Britain. Most of the people who would have an affinity with Norm Geras and company are reluctant to go the whole route and do a “Hitchens”. However, on most of the “talking points” that keep cropping up on Harry’s Place, you can find a Marc Cooper chiming in. This includes what a beast Hugo Chavez is, the need to promote the right of the National Endowment for Democracy to operate in Cuba, etc.

What makes you think the current insurgency in Iraq is not democratic? They seem to have well over 50% support in their communities. As opposed to, say, the 1980s ‘Contras’ insurgency in Nicaragua.

The oddest thing about the criticism of that manifesto, to my mind, is how little both the left and the right (which is what the decent left is — a rightwing group that drops words like “comrade” into its enthusiastic encomiums of the killing fields) have absorbed what did happen in the Iraq invasion. Put simply, the Iraq invasion proves that foreign policy-making needs to become much more democratic in the old democracies. The cold war, which allowed the executive branch to usurp foreign policymaking at the expense of the old system of checks and balances, is gone, but the abuse has gotten much worse. The first order of business for anybody who seriously supports “humanitarian interventions” is to oppose that executive usurpation; to oppose trickery and deceit in the runup to any intervention; to oppose trickery and deceit in the operation of the intervention; to oppose the thrusting of fraudulent proxies upon the target states that are “intervened” upon; to oppose largescale looting of those states; to oppose imposing on those states changes in infrastructure that are solely to the interest of the occupying power; and to urge timeliness in turning the occupied state over to its people.

It is so obvious that, even if you support ‘intervention’ — and I don’t — it is not politically possible if the means to achieve it are fraudulent. To make it politically possible, the interventionists have become necessarily become vehicles of disinformation, shoring up an original fraud in which they contrived because the ‘end’ was good. Sorry, the only way this works is to curtail democracy — which is how you end up with the advocates of ‘international’ democracy supporting anti-democratic procedures (extension of executive power, lying, misinformatin) in the democracies they live in. This is what happens when your politics aren’t rooted in legitimacy.

‘Yes, the EM crowd is for something. It actually supports a policy conducted by a recognized institution with tangible powers. It’s a capital offence in your book, isn’t it.’

No I have no problems with Harry’s Place being Blair-ite blog. My problem is that they are not honest about it. The farcical gibberish about the Euston Manifesto is a case in point. In fact there already is a manifesto that contains all the Eustonites’ stuff…it’s called the Labour Party Manifesto.

I have no problems with white middle class assimilated conformists. What I can’t stand is when they are disingenuous and try to pretend that they are far more rebellious than they actually are (i.e. not rebellious at all).

There’s a debate to be had about exactly what would constitute “reasoned, considered [and politically effective] retaliation for American sponsorship of Israeli imperialism”. ‘Please don’t colonise and ethnically cleanse the Palestinians’ has not worked very well. But maybe that’s for another thread.

And incidentally in case you want to see what ‘the betrayal of the Enlightenment Project’ and ‘cultural relativism’ looks like: it looks like this:

http://thinkprogress.org/2006/04/18/rices-good-friend-a-brutal-oil-rich-dictator/

(via Atrios).

from brendan –

“The salient point about the ‘decents’ is that they dislike, or hate might be a better word, indigenous movements towards democracy, freedom and so forth. Instead they always and in all cases argue that Western values must be brought to the rest of the world…via force, if necessary.”

And as for abb1’s notion that the insurgents in Iraq are some sort of democratic resistance movement.

Little wonder the EM gets support.

Convoluted.

Somehow I suspect that popular resistance has nothing to with suffering or not suffering under Saddam (especially now, in 2006). Popular resistance exists in all places where foreigners are trying to exercise power over local people, including Shia slums of Baghdad; that’s all there is to it.

Also, both ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ refer to exactly the same concept, one from Latin, the other from Greek.

If torture is worse in one place than another, it is really not worth highlighting this fact along with condemning it, to show that although it’s wrong it doesn’t detract from the rightness of a cause?

Lord, but this is confused. Firstly, if a cause is right it remains right irrespective of what’s done in its name; I think the word you’re looking for is more like ‘doctrine’ or ‘strategy’. The conflation of the two ideas is telling. For the record, I believe that the values represented by the British and US Constitutions are greatly superior to the values in whose name Saddam Hussein ruled. This is not inconsistent with opposing the war.

Secondly, a political strategy (or doctrine) may be discredited by what’s done in its name. But in this case the appropriate point of reference is internal, not external: the point is not that following this strategy makes us the worst in the world, but that it makes us do things that are inconsistent with our stated values. If this weren’t the case, any criticism of anything done by the US or Britain could be parried by saying Did you realise that China executed over 1,000 people last year alone? We’re hardly in that league, are we?

Abb 1,

“‘popular’ and ‘democratic’ refer to exactly the same concept, one from Latin, the other from Greek.”

They share an etymology perhaps, but the modern meanings are distinct. A ‘popular dictator’ is not an oxymoron, a ‘democratic’ one is. In any case goals are different from means – a popular resistance might not aim at democracy. It might, as the resistance to the Shah in Iran did, aim at quai-democratic theocracy, or whatever.

‘Popular resistance exists in all places where foreigners are trying to exercise power over local people…’ That may, in the log run, be more or less true. ‘…that’s all there is to it.’ That definitely isn’t.

On the second read – nah, your “resistance that aims at democracy” doesn’t make much sense to me.

Resistance ames at only one thing – getting rid of whatever it’s resisting against. Resistance unites various groups that have different ideas about democracy and everything else: right and left, nationalists, communists, religious nuts and pissed off totally apolitical people – they are all together in the resistance. They don’t necessarily have anything else in common. But if they have popular support, that’s democratic, that’s for the people and of the people.

“if they have popular support, that’s democratic, that’s for the people and of the people.”

To take this back to the concrete case of Iraq, I suppose what might then be in question is “what is popular support?” I mean: violent resistance to the US presence may be very popular in Anbar and beyond; this doesn’t mean it doesn’t aim at restoring the Shia and Kurdish populations to subordinate positions, which isn’t very democratic, and presumably isn’t very popular in those communities.

Why, what’s your evidence that an average fallujah shopkeeper risking his life planting a bomb on a road is dreaming of restoring the Shia and Kurdish populations to subordinate positions?

Had he ever controlled Shia and Kurdish populations personally?

As far as the Kurdish population is concerned, there’s been no subordinate position there since 1991, why wasn’t this fallujah shopkeeper shooting his RPG before 2003?

Imagine that foreigners invaded your country, bombed your town, killed your nephew and you are now planting a bomb on the road. Are you doing this to restore Puerto Ricans and Virgin Islanders to their subordinate positions?

It’s not so much revenge-based as nationalism-based; people don’t like to be controlled by foreigners, especially foreigners with different language, culture, religion. For example, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, killed a bunch of people there and got kicked out eventually. And that was the end of it, Afghans didn’t follow them to the USSR to inflict revenge.

In Northern Ireland, wasn’t there at least two IRAs, both separatist, both militant but with totally different ideologies, ames, strategies; not to mention a bunch of other various splinter groups. I got an impression that the ‘Officials’, at least, prefered a democratic solution.

Who were they supposed to resist in Fallujah before 2003? The Shia Arabs in Iraq, I understand, were banned by secular Baathist government from practicing their religious rituals, so they did resist on account of that (not because of being in a ‘subordinate position’ as you said), but the Fallujah people for some reason didn’t have that problem. Maybe they aren’t that religious, I don’t know.

‘Still, the objective of the IRA was to get Northern Ireland out of the UK (against the will of the majority of its people).’

Ah yes but this is a fundamental problem of democracy isn’t it? Democracy involves the will of the ‘majority’ of the people but this begs the question, majority of WHAT? The IRA would undoubtedly have counter-argued that Northern Ireland simply did not exist: it was colonists creation. In a unified vote of all of Ireland then the majority of people would have voted for a united ireland (the Unionist’s counter-argument that the majority of the UK would not have wanted Northern Ireland to be joined with Ireland won’t wash as, I think, the majority of British people have always been in favour of troops withdrawal and if necessary a united ireland).

Ipso fact, the Sunnis would undoubtedly counter-argue that Iraq is a colonists creation and that a vote amongst SUNNIS would unquestionably show a majority in favour of the insurgency.

This is the problem of modern democracy: it presupposes relatively homogenous nation states, which is what (in Europe) we now have. But in places where these don’t exist, democratic thinking breaks down.

Yep the Provisionals (now ususally known simply as “the IRA”) split in 1970 from the Officials who wanted to take a more political, rather than military, approach based on Marxist theory. So the Officials mostly stuck to peaceful methods.

It’s quite true that the Sunni Arab resistance is based to a large degree on nationalism. Nationalism can entail some fairly nasty aspects relating to domination of others though. I see no reason to suppose that to be less true of (variants of) Iraqi nationalism than is generally the case.

‘The resistance inside Anbar is popular (democratic) inside Anbar.’

With respect, I’m not sure you’ve proved that. Earlier you posted a figure that 70% of the province’s population supports attacks upon American troops. That may very well be so, but alas, as we know perfectly well, that’s not all the “resistance” does, it also targets mosques, shrines, crowds of civilians etc.

‘The Paris Commune, for example, was popular and democratic inside Paris; if it wasn’t supported in the provinces, so what.’

I’m not aware that the Paris Communards made a habit of travelling into the French provinces and massacring large crowds of civilians. In fact, I seem to my recall from my leftist studenty days a figure that 60 people were killed in the Communard uprising, and 60,000 were killed by the French army in putting it down (though those figures may have been exaggerated for effect). I’m also not aware that France was a full democracy in 1870, with universal suffrage as exists in Iraq today. And would the crushing of the Commune have prompted a report like this one, from the Independent’s anti-war correspondent Patrick Cockburn:

After six months of suicide bombings orchestrated from Fallujah against young army and police recruits, most Shia Muslims in Baghdad were delighted when the US Marines largely destroyed the city last November.

Published on Tuesday, February 22, 2005

‘But the residents of Anbar province are not fighting against any democratic process, they seem to be all right with that, they voted in the last elections.’

That may well be so. If so, it’s necessary to separate them in one’s mind from the foreign jihadis. Al-Zarqawi, for instance, was widely quoted as inveighing against the ‘evil principle’ of democracy.

“With respect, I’m not sure you’ve proved that. Earlier you posted a figure that 70% of the province’s population supports attacks upon American troops. That may very well be so, but alas, as we know perfectly well, that’s not all the “resistance” does, it also targets mosques, shrines, crowds of civilians etc.”

It’s been a truism on some parts of the left (and I’ve seen it sneaking into mainstream press circles in recent months) that much of the nationalist Sunni resistance hates the anti-civilian terrorist actions of the religious fanatics (supposedly foreign). I don’t know how clean the division is and I suspect that there have been some anti-Shiite atrocities by nationalist Sunnis as well, but there is probably some division nonetheless. Most of the attacks made by the Sunni resistance have been against the American forces–it’s just that the minority that are directed against “soft” civilian targets are likely to create a much bigger death toll and get much more attention in the press, for a couple of different reasons. (One, because it should. Attacks that kill more people should get more coverage. Two, because it’s been convenient until recently to claim that all the resistance forces are uniformly barbaric Sunni monsters. I noticed that storyline beginning to change in the NYT sometime last year, when I started reading about the US trying to sweet-talk the Sunnis and maybe reason with the nationalists. This also coincided with the period when the US started to openly criticize the Shiite torture centers and death squads, which have probably helped drive many Sunnis into supporting the resistance.)

No references handy, so of course there’s no reason for you to take my word for it. But I’m feeling lazy, so you’ll have to do your own googling if you’re curious.

After six months of suicide bombings orchestrated from Fallujah against young army and police recruits, most Shia Muslims in Baghdad were delighted when the US Marines largely destroyed the city last November.

Actually, I don’t think this is true at all. I distinctly remember press reports about Shia Muslims in Baghdad being shocked and disgusted and Mr. al-Sadr expressing solidarity on several occasions.

I don’t have a link, but neither do you; and when you state something like this as a fact you should be able to prove it.

The point is not that the Sunni “resistance” is democratic. The point is that very few of the anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century that the Eustonites retrospectively support were any more democratic. Certainly, the FLN wasn’t, while the Fourth Republic was.

The old left line was always to support non-democratic anti-imperialists against democratic imperialists. Geras and co. are free to disagree with that line, but they can’t claim continuity with it.

Oh, yeah, that was a link, sorry. In this quote he is talking about Islamist groups, though, that’s a small minority. Of course it’s a part of the resistance too, but like I said: there are various groups there that may have nothing in common whatsoever.

He also says: US military commanders are now dubious about the chances of winning an outright military victory over the Sunni rebels who have a firm core of supporters among the five million-strong Sunni Muslim community. That’s my point exactly, the community thing.

‘Is that really so? I bow to those who have followed the situation more closely than I, but my vague impression was that the Sunni Arabs are among the few people who have a particularly strong commitment to the survival of an Iraqi state – them and Moqtada al-Sadr’s people, who do make Iraqi nationalist noises and oppose federalism. This may partly be due to economic reasons – most of the oil is in the Kurdish-dominated North and the Shia-dominated South. If Iraq really were to break up, the Sunni Arabs of the central provinces would be left with very little.’

No you are quite right. The Sunnis do indeed want the survival of a relatively strong state, mainly as you say, because they don’t have any oil in their part of Iraq.

However, my deeper point remains. I wonder how many Iraqis REALLY see themselves as being Iraqis and not Sunnis, Shias, Kurds, Turkmen etc, who happen to have found themselves in Iraq.

One last point that should be made. According to the ‘decents’…actually I don’t need to go on do I? Everyone knows what they think.

Anyway you won’t be surprised to hear that this is not how people in Iraq see things. According to the decents there is a ‘baathist-jihadist’ alliance and yada yada yada.

It is very unlikely that this bears any relationship to the truth. On the contrary, Zarqawi and Al-Qaeda terrorists have been widely despised by the native insurgency.

And contrary to the canards about ‘neo-baathism’ etc. (it should be noted that the decents have never at any point produced any statement from any insurgent or insurgency linked political movement to back this up but ‘facts are funny things’ arent they?)….it is unlikely that the Sunni insurgents actually want to bring back Saddam. Instead they see themselves as being predominantly secular (NOT JIHADIST) insurgents fighting against IRANIAN IMPERIALISM. Sunni (racist?) views of Shias have always viewed them as being a bunch of crazed religious fundamentalists, and the Sunnis justify what they are doing by saying that, rather than fighting for theocracy, they are fighting against it, and that the Americans have helped to bring an Iranian theocracy to power. Hence the sudden volte face of some Sunnis, thinking that actually if the Americans stay they might bolster the insurgents in their fight against the Shia/Iranian government.

Pithlord: “The Eustonites are picking up an earlier Marxist view that Engels expressed in relation to Algeria: namely, that it is the role of capitalist colonialism to bring the non-white countries into modernity and thereby make them ready for socialism.”

While Engels expressed this view in 1848, he reversed 9 years later and opposed French colonialism. Marx went through a similar evolution. He started out writing articles for the Herald claiming that India was on a civilizing mission in India, but eventually condemned its presence as based on larceny.

For an excellent historical analysis of British “leftist” imperialist apologetics of the sort that finds its latest expression in Geras, Harry’s Place, Nick Cohen et al, see:

http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/04/peculiarities-of-pro-war-left.html

tim,

I have no trouble agreeing that a democratic anti-imperialist movement (say the Indian National Congress) is preferable to an authoritarian one. But the fact is that the vast majority of anti-imperialist movements have been nationalist-authoritarian, whether with a leftist or rightist cast.

It was perfectly obvious from how North Vietnam was run, for example, that the Viet Cong’s victory would mean a Stalinist hellhole. The fact that lots of good people didn’t want to face up to this reality doesn’t mean the facts weren’t available.

OTOH, countries which are domestically democratic have not acted very differently from ones that are domestically authoritarian when they occupy overseas colonies. Probably the worst in the classical era of European colonialism was democratic Belgium’s treatment of the Congo. That’s because the logic of occupation and the logic of democracy are the opposite. Imperialism is never democratic for the imperialized, although the folks in the metropolis may enjoy human rights and liberal democracy, just as South African whites under apartheid essentially did.

So the old left view — that anti-imperial movements should be critically supported regardless of their domestic politics — wasn’t as stupid as all that. It is basically the Red Dawn “because we live here” point. National self-determination is a necessary, albeit obviously not sufficient, condition for democratic self-determination. So the project of liberal imperialism is contradictory from the outset.

Not that I support the Iraqi Sunni “resistance.” I think, in the end, you have to make a judgment call about whether a particular movement is dominantly sectarian or dominantly anti-imperialist. But the “decents” go to the other extreme and support the occupation, presumably on the basis that it will ultimately bring about a more democratic Iraqi order, which I think was always delusional. Only Iraqis can bring about a democratic Iraqi order.